There are three, not simply two outcomes to war. In addition to being either won or lost, a war can be neither won nor lost but trapped in stalemate. What then ensues is a long, brutal process of attrition, in the hope that one side or the other despairs and gives up. Guerrilla wars in particular have always proven hard to end. As long as the insurgents have some support from the local population and access to money and arms, government forces will be hard pressed to defeat them completely, despite endless minor victories. In Sri Lanka, there were times when the Tamil Tigers had effectively created the independent Tamil state they demanded in the North of the island of Sri Lanka. But no central government in Colombo was going to sanction the break away. Thus though tens of millions of scarce dollars were consumed by the war against the Tigers, and the military were at their wits’ end in tackling the guerrillas, successive Sri Lankan governments persisted with the conflict. Worse, on the few occasions when there was talk of a cease-fire or even peace, the Tamils took this as a sign of government weakness and merely stepped up their insurgency.
It took the Norwegians, as honest international peace brokers, with no vested interest in Sri Lanka other than perhaps a fondness for a good cup of Ceylon tea, to convince all the different parties in this conflict, that the time for killing was over and a solution had to be reached by negotiation and compromise. The emphatic election of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe on a peace ticket armed the government with a mandate to talk. The Norwegians were then able to persuade the Tamil Tiger leadership to give peace a chance.
Unfortunately, in the weeks after the cease-fire last February, both the government and the Tigers accused each other of not honoring the terms of the cease-fire, which included a mutual pullback of forces. More seriously, Sri Lanka’s minority Muslim population on the edge of the Tamil area, who had enthusiastically backed the peace initiative, found themselves subject to attacks and harassment by the Tigers. Peace talks that had been scheduled for May were postponed. Hard-liners within the Sri Lankan establishment seemed to be moving away from their endorsement of Wickremesinghe’s initiative. In particular, the government’s supporters began to fear that President Kumaratunga might use her constitutional powers to dissolve Parliament and thus throw the whole peace process into chaos. It must be doubted that at this most sensitive moment, Sri Lanka can cope with any struggle to amend the constitution to abolish these presidential powers, as the government has suggested. Perhaps, a presidential intervention was the lever that Norwegian peacemakers used to persuade the Tamil Tigers to agree to the substantive negotiations that are due to start next month in Thailand. It is certain that the government’s new promise to lift a ban on the Tigers has robbed the rebels of a final excuse to stay away.
In agreeing to talk, each side is accepting that neither will obtain everything it wants. However, both will be opening the way to the one outcome most earnestly desired by every Sri Lankan, whatever his cultural background — and that outcome is peace.
